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Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...

https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick

So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.

1 day agoby SXX

Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this.

I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.

1 day agoby x187463

The mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.

1 day agoby jerf

I am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.

This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.

1 day agoby zero_k

I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”.

I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.

2 days agoby jrmg

Disposable vapes are an abomination that somehow society has normalised.

1 day agoby nusl

Long live hacking! This is what Hacker News is all about. Great article and fun project!

1 day agoby droobles

This reminds me of when I was a kid, taking apart toys just to keep the tiny motors and circuit boards like treasures. Now as an adult, seeing someone pull a full working system out of a disposable vape to run a website feels like the same kind of magic. Maybe this is what romance looks like in the tech world.

19 hours agoby Daisywh

The current state of technology is ... weird. From AI doing our art instead of our work, to hosting a website on an eCigarette. "Weird" is the only word I can think of at this moment.

1 day agoby NoSalt

Could one say that the author found the ultimate computing platform for running vaporware?

1 day agoby isoprophlex

We need to reduce microplastics.

Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.

I don't know if I'm sad or happy.

1 day agoby RedShift1

This was my first time working with perl and I have to say, it’s quite well suited to this kind of task.

Nice to see Perl get positive press. Fun project, Bogdan!

https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/u...

1 day agoby gbacon

I’m not vaping mom, It’s my webserver.

1 day agoby daft_pink

Getting a 503 error now upon request to the vape hosted blog. Safe to say that it got smoked by the hacker news traffic volume!

23 hours agoby duncangh

"pacifiers for adults" is probably the best description for a vape that I have ever read.

15 hours agoby bvvgpc

I always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.

1 day agoby 1970-01-01

Meta comment: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a HN thread with this ratio of upvotes to comments (8 vs. 251)

Disposable vapes are an extreme failure of legislation, but this is a cool hack nonetheless!

1 day agoby jumploops

I am SHOCKED everytime I am reminded those Disposable Vapes exist.

My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE?

Insane.

At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?

1 day agoby dev0p

By law, neither electronics nor batteries can be disposed of with generic waste. This is the case in the EU, at least. So how are people then disposing these devices?

Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.

1 day agoby distances

I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.

Yet?

1 day agoby peteforde

So the EEs are right. Electrical circuits run on magic smoke.

1 day agoby analog31

Took a few attempts (over a few hours) to get the vape hosted version to load... but it just worked and I felt soooo happy!

I wonder if you could use one vape as a load balancer, then have a few of them serving the content?

15 hours agoby Lprince

This is why I come to HackerNews. This made my day.

1 day agoby zeppelin101

> This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP.

Anyone have any experience with SLIP for macOS? Curious if the author was actually able to make that work, I’ve been looking into something similar the past few weeks with no luck.

20 hours agoby SandmanDP

I used to see disposable vapes dumped on the street until they were banned (thankfully). All those wasted batteries and microcontrollers is really wasteful.

1 day agoby curvaturearth

I never thought I'd see someone turn a vape into a web server. Totally absurd but also kind of brilliant. I probably won’t remember the technical details, but that ‘why not just try it’ attitude is seriously contagious.

19 hours agoby ChaoPrayaWave

Makes me start thinking of cool use cases like dropping pineapples all over the place or those GeoCaching things

8 hours agoby ge96

This is really impressive. I laughed when I got 503 Unavailable on the hosted URL. I guess we're all hugging that little vape CPU a little too hard. :)

1 day agoby accrual

Missed opportunity to put a 503:Vape Unavailable http error.

1 day agoby tgtweak

We are truly living in the precursor to some cyberpunk fever dream with this. Give it a few years and we’ll be smokin’ grandma & grandpa’s uploads out of vapes.

20 hours agoby ineedasername

Want to fit a web server into a speck of dust? Check out smews ( https://github.com/2xs/smews ) it runs with just 8k of flash and 512 bytes of RAM, supports HTTP 1.1 over TCP/IP, SLIP or others, with both static and dynamic content (GET and POST) The code is 18 years old and hasn’t moved in 10, A sandbox for budding pentesters ;)

11 hours agoby PrinST

So a question maybe someone can clue me in on here: while the specs on that MCU seem imminently reasonable to me (especially compared to some of the PIC12F and similar I've used in the past) the thing that feels odd is the high clock speed ARM core. Is it really that cheap and easy to drop an M0 core or ip block into an MCU? Why not more RAM and a simpler/slower core? The M0 feels grossly overkill.

1 day agoby rpcope1

so I had to throw nginx in front of it so my little router wouldn't explode, but I hope some people will get to experience the relaxing loading experience live.

1 day agoby BogdanTheGeek

True vaperware

1 day agoby oltmang

Nice. But ...

> Later modems used PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol)

PPP a (c)slip are not used by modems but by the computers whose serials are up and running. Even without modems.

1 day agoby notorandit

You think a Cortex-M0+ in a disposable vape is wasteful, wait until you see the ones with colour touchscreens and Bluetooth radios. It's probably only a matter of time before they start running Android on them.

2 days agoby jsheard

This is cool, but, man, I felt like such a pathetic excuse for a human being when, brutally craving nicotine, with my vape empty of the fruit-flavoured juice that I am literally addicted to like the stupid pathetic baby that I am, and stuck with the cravings because all the shops are closed until morning, and so, in need of a distraction, I opened Hacker News. FFS.

Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.

1 day agoby gabriel666smith

living that cloud life

1 day agoby konfusinomicon

As of this moment, this article has 420 comments which seems fitting.

I guess until now, mine may be the 421st.

12 hours agoby ants_everywhere

very impressive, I wonder if it would run Collapse OS (https://collapseos.org/)

1 day agoby broabprobe

This is why I go to hackernews every day <3

1 day agoby rozumbrada

At this point, is there any device left we could not make a web server yet?

12 hours agoby sentinelsignal

But the essential resources for website hosting are public IP address and link bandwidth. Not a tiny computer.

16 hours agoby oldherl

I bought a few hundred Puyas for my lab as stock for projects. They are quite capable and very cheap uCs to have around.

1 day agoby NoiseBert69

I respect the point about not wanting to send the manufacturer any business, but I would love to know the brand so I'd know which ones to rescue if given the chance.

1 day agoby Dilettante_

It's all fun and games to host a blog, but Ukrainian home garage drone manufacturers actually defend territory with these kinds of projects.

10 hours agoby myflash13

It would be nice to pool ideeas for what they could be recycled into. Imagine the amount of automatic cat feeders the world could build with these.

1 day agoby metal696heart

Reality catching up with satire: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4&t=170s

1 day agoby t_mann

Has anyone done the joke about "next big cloud platform" yet?

1 day agoby r0bbbo

This is quite amazing. Dumb question: is there a way to run it in QEMU?

1 day agoby BruceEel

Can someone please make a zyn tin container for these?

1 day agoby zsimjee

Wow, it even survived the HN hug of death.

1 day agoby throwaway3b03

I found of these that had a built-in retro game console with screen. Like, the kind of little game that a small child would be interested in. So frustrating.

1 day agoby markstos

Hei ; Preact would be deff appropriate in that scenario ; it's a clone of react that is meant to be small !

Very inspiring work btw !

1 day agoby 6r17

Any lucky ones? I got only 504-s.

1 day agoby mdavid626

Appcolypse plan: Ammo? Canned food? Fresh water? No.

1,200 geek bars in a faraday cage.

23 hours agoby coffeecantcode

Your GitHub link in the doc gives me a 404. Otherwise, good stuff!

2 days agoby HardwareLust

How does the device compare to the computer we used to put a man on the moon?

1 day agoby koliber

What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition, but I might just be stupid.

2 days agoby dudeWithAMood

Very appropriate to host “Suck it, Jin-Yang!”

1 day agoby rusabd

And its faster than Vercel!

20 hours agoby s-mon

It's down. =(

1 day agoby dirtyoldmick

This is like a really really fast VIC 20!

1 day agoby kpil

but why? i upload my website to cloudflare pages.

20 hours agoby faangguyindia

Time for the disposable vape web farm

1 day agoby jhoechtl

but will it run Doom? :)

1 day agoby arcabus

The vape is 503

1 day agoby theyknowitsxmas

Anyone got an RSS for this blog?

1 day agoby prism56

504 timeout -- fug of breath

1 day agoby 867-5309

That's gotta be between 75 and 90% less damaging to humanity than the designed use of a disposable vape. Well done, Bogdan!

I'm reminded of the project Tom7 put together a few years back where he used the surplus components inside a digital COVID kit as spare memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

1 day agoby shadowgovt

I wonder how much cost would be added if they included a small usb storage drive in those things. You could incentivize non-disposal because people would have a million of those things.

It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.

1 day agoby ivape

this is fun af

14 hours agoby noreplydev

I don't understand the hardware setup. There is a usb-c port and they talk about usb serial devices which could be a usb to serial port, but what is after that? There are no pictures of it connected.

1 day agoby CyberDildonics

interesting

15 hours agoby SamBuildpcb

** yeah

1 day agoby spacebacon

VaPS

1 day agoby braunshizzle

Now make a cluster of them running on load balancer

1 day agoby panarchy